2006 Reports

Community College Management Practices That Promote Student Success

Jenkins, Paul Davis

This Brief summarizes a study by the Community College Research Center of community college management practices that promote student success. This study addresses the limitations of previous research on the effectiveness of undergraduate institutions in several ways. It takes advantage of a rich set of longitudinal student unit record data to control for the individual characteristics of the students that the colleges serve. Because the study is based on the outcomes of both full-time and part-time students, our measure of institutional effectiveness is better suited to community colleges and their students than is the National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES) “student-right-to-know” measure commonly used by other studies. We also measured student persistence in addition to completion and transfer, which is appropriate given
that community college students often take a long time to complete their programs or to transfer. Our sample is confined to all community colleges in a single state, thus eliminating the effects on institutional performance of variations in public policy and institutional mission, practice, and resources across states.